Coming into the End Zone Read Online Free

at the top of the board. It reads: ‘In the beginning was the word.’
    The day grows hotter. Seven-thirty now. The white page clipped to the board is still virgin, unmarked by me but wrinkled with damp. The only certainty is the firm, commanding way the clip holds the paper, surer of its function than I am of mine. Where is the word according to St. John, with which to begin?
    The maid comes this morning. When I was a girl, the last time I had a maid until I came to Washington, my mother called all servants ‘treasures.’ Why? I wonder. Because she felt she had found them, exclusively? Because they were hers alone? Because they were, theoretically, faithful, of great value to household order, asking nothing but small pay and the rewarding sense of having served well? I think she believed all this of her treasures.
    My treasure, a young girl from Puerto Rico, comes an hour and a half late. Still, she is a rarity in Washington because she does arrive. She commands hefty pay, close to twelve dollars an hour if she stays only the few hours she seems to be here. She is sketchy about her dusting. Underneath the beds she never cares to explore, nor behind or beneath any stationary furniture. She is hostile to interior windowsills, seeming to believe they are not part of the house, and resentful of fingerprints wherever they may appear. She leaves bottles and bottle caps, oily rags, and pieces of the vacuum in strategic places so I will know she has been there and used them.
    But she is my treasure. She does what I no longer want to do, she brings some order and shine to our possessions, she makes the house smell of cleaning agents (even if it is not very clean) and Guardsman furniture polish. In my lifetime I have had too little practice with servants. I shy away from giving her instructions or even complaining about her omissions. I hide in my study, feeling guilty about having her do what I should be doing myself. My mother was very good at the mistress-servant relationship. She believed that the mistress had the upper hand over the treasure. In her time that was probably true. But not now. I am humbly, undemandingly grateful for any action my treasure deems it proper to take.
    I cower behind my PC, and wait to go over from the carriage house to the main house until I see the lights are turned off. She has gone. I can have a guiltless lunch, repossess the house, recover from my feelings of inadequacy and failure, breathe in the deceptive odor of Murphy’s Soap.
    The mail has come. There are nine brown cardboard book boxes that the mailman, in his customary snit at the volume of my mail, has dumped down in a messy pile in the vestibule. The letters he sticks through the slot in the door. While I wait for my usual Progresso minestrone soup to heat up (I am an obsessive eater who likes repetition in foods, perhaps because I am too unskilled to think up variations), I shuffle through the mail.
    The usual assortment. Requests for contributions, including one from a local public television station which seems to eat up its meager budget with frequent mailings asking for contributions. A case of the cat consuming its own tail. Three solicitations of my support for the local opera, the local Kennedy Center patrons’ group, the local Arena theater. An olio of catalogues including—yes, I knew it was about time for it again—one from Comfortably Yours.
    The clothes in most of the catalogues, sent unbidden, are for persons two sizes smaller and thirty years younger than I. There are catalogues for men’s equipment, including one for hunting clothes and one entirely devoted to guns and knives, although I have not lived with a man for seventeen years. One is filled with elaborate toys and clothes for children: my youngest child is now thirty-seven years old.
    I am too exasperated to look through the rest. I carry the third-class mail, the catalogues, the publishers’ advance notices, the requests for